Andy Waddington
	When not tramping the world in search of better wilderness sports, landscape and wildlife photographs, or pushing back the frontiers of underground exploration, Andy runs "Pennine Software".
	Based in rural Teesdale, this is a small software consultancy which originally provided both software implementation and software quality assurance services to Acorn Computers Ltd. (R.I.P.) and the Acorn Developer community on a commercial basis. Now it is a non-profit setup concentrating mainly on open source software for the Linux platform.

Married with one daughter, and one son, and living in SW County Durham. Raising children and writing open source software still leaves Andy with some time for leisure interests, such as Caving, Climbing, Mountaineering, Ski-touring (including nordic skiing on the doorstep), Backpacking, Photography, Canoeing and creating a woodland garden and wildflower meadow, currently with c200 species of British Native, and Western North American trees. It being some time since graduating in Physics, and having much more interest in the life sciences, Andy is intermittently studying for a further BSc degree with the Open University (see my OU résumé page). Currently, this study (like the business :-) is interrupted for extended paternity leave...

Contacting Members of the Waddington family:

By email:

Mailbox "Andrew" (or "Mary" etc.) on site "pennine.demon.co.uk". Sorry you can't just click on that, but putting properly formed mailto: URLs on web pages ask for junk mail, to which I very strongly object. If you have received a bounce "rejected by local policy" or "see www.pennine.demon.co.uk/mail/" then you cannot get mail through to me because of previous abuse by some sender on your domain - for solutions see our mail policy page.

By phone:

[0|+44]1833 690245 will get you an answering machine. You need to talk to this, even if a hearing person is standing right next to the phone, and if it proves convenient, the phone will be picked up. If the call is not considered appropriate at the time it is received, the phone will be unceremoniously put back down. We recommend emailing for an appointment if you really think a phone call is necessary. Failing any reply, leave your usual details including the reason for the call and the call will be returned when convenient for us.

By post:

This contact method is deprecated. If you have something which can't be sent electronically, email for a postal address.

Be warned: unsolicited advertising material is not tolerated. The household has a very aggressive retaliation policy for junk mail, and for postal junk, that can be very expensive for you - we still have a large collection of broken quarry tiles to dispose of :-)

Related resources on the web:

C.U.C.C. expeditions

Andy was the original creator and maintainer of about 8Mb of textual resource and three times that volume of pictorial material detailing the activities and discoveries of the Cambridge University Caving Club and ex-Cambridge Speleologists on the Loser Plateau of the Totes Gebirge in Austria over the last two decades. This work-in-progress is now shared through a CVS system, with pages updated after (and of late, even during) each year's trip, and includes descriptions of the caves, all published accounts (with the exception of a very few articles published through the journals of other organisations who have failed to adapt to modern thinking on universal availability of publications and internet publishing) and expedition logbooks in a highly-interlinked structure, currently comprising over 600 documents. Owing to some delicate politics, it is possible that you will find some expedition pages password-protected (these should just be ones in the "noinfo" hierarchy). The CUCC and exCS ones should always be accessible and most of the actual useful documents are public.

Northern Pennine Club

As well as caving with CUCC, Andy was Recorder and Librarian of the NPC for fourteen years, and is now its Webmaster, having almost completed republishing all the club's major publications 1952-present on the web.

Ski guide to the Northern Dales

This may one day be a published guidebook, but for now is another work in progress (hence the quality of the images, most of which are digitised from video). It includes details of both nordic and alpine ski tours which can be done in a good winter in southern County Durham and North Yorkshire. This tends to be present as a compressed ZIP file during the summer, but becomes active again around October.

Kayaking

Andy started kayaking as a student in 1976, but, being very busy with the caving club, didn't take it very far. Having got back into it in 2000, Foot and Mouth promptly stopped access to all the UK's rivers, so Sea Kayaking was the solution. This proves to be much more of a "wilderness sport" involving multi-day camping expeditions, and a major new area of enthusiasm, now stretching to include cedar-strip kayak building. Andy has now paddled rivers in England, Scotland, Wales, France, Austria and New Zealand, and the sea off England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and New Zealand. This sport has given him his first published photographs, including the front cover of "English White Water".

A Cautionary Tale

Andy broke his foot in 1981 in Yosemite, in what turned out to be a minor epic. Nowhere near as epic as some of the accounts of the incident which have come back via "Chinese Whispers", so here is the full account.

Landscape and Wildlife Photography

A selection of images (from a transparency library of over 11000) taken in a few of the wilder places we have visited on three continents. All these pictures are available as high quality mounted and framed prints of various sizes, or for publication - see the contact details on the gallery pages. With the advent of digital photography, there are a lot more photos coming online shortly, on a different server (there is only 20 Mb of space on this one, and we came back with 10 Gb of photos from one trip recently...).

Arboretum

There is a considerable volume of documentation on many of the species of tree grown here. A start has finally been made on putting this up on the web. This area contains a page of "field guide" style information for each species, describing the trees, usually with a silhouette, a range map, and often with graphics of leaves, fruit, flowers etc.. Details of individual trees on our property are included, and it is intended to add photographs soon, with pages for our ferns and herbaceous underplantings in time. We have just over two hundred and thirty species of trees and shrubs in our collection, most native to the North American Pacific slope or to the UK. About one in six of these has a page on the web so far...

Consumer issues

Andy believes that both individuals and organisations should obey the laws of the country where they are operating. If those laws compel them to do something widely regarded as unfair or immoral, or if protection of their operations involves government troops guilty of widespread human rights abuses, they should clear themselves and all their assets out of that country, rather than comply. They certainly shouldn't be meddling in politics or immorally manipulating a local situation to their own advantage. He further believes that multinationals only take notice of profits, so that only consumer power and widespread publicity can influence them in the long term. He doesn't think innocent Nigerians or Colombians should be killed or tortured. As it happens he will not buy or use products of Royal Dutch Shell or British Petroleum.

Andy is also a strong believer in custodial sentences (some days per recipient, doubling indefinitely for repeat offences) for junk mailers, both postal and electronic. If you want to contribute to the elimination of this form of human rights abuse, (at least as originated in the US), you might like to visit the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email website. Andy's own solutions for postal junk are mainly retaliation-based (post heavy objects like old quarry tiles by first class mail to their FREEPOST addresses, or print dozens of paid-by-recipient postcards asking them to stop junk mailing).

And smoking ? It goes without saying that smoking should be banned in all public places, starting with National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and later extending to anywhere on, upwind of, or visible from, any public right of way, whether pedestrian or vehicular. Children should never be able to see smoking in a situation where it could be taken as being in any way socially acceptable behaviour.